Strategies for Creating Effective Online Tests

Obviously, there are many strategies students can use to cheat. While it would be naïve to assume there isn’t cheating, the vast majority of your students want to succeed on their own merits.

A few precautions will eliminate most of the easy cheats, and the classic strategies will work for the others.

The anonymity of the online environment may open up new avenues for the cheaters, but it’s not really much different from your face-to-face classes. A few people will go to great lengths to cheat, but most will be honest as long as it’s not too easy to get away with it.

Unless someone is on hand to proctor examinations, it’s useful to remember that all online quizzes are “open book.”

Quiz Strategies

Using the quiz tool effectively takes some work and practice. The first thing to do is to use effective question design strategies. If you ask good questions, you’ll get useful data about your students’ performance and understanding of the material. 

Avoid True/False: True/false questions are usually oversimplified to begin with and give too much credit for those who simply guess or toss a coin and get half the questions right by accident. Although you may find moments in which this form is the best choice, it’s a good one to avoid as a general rule.

Questions that emphasize memorization are not as effective for evaluating a student’s progress. 

Apply the Lessons: Create questions that force students to apply lessons from the material to real-life scenarios. This is really the essence of what mathematics has always called “story problems,” and it’s an effective method for measuring how well one can relate new lessons to the surrounding world. 

Create several variants on a quiz, with each putting questions in a different order. Since grading is likely automated, this shouldn’t result in additional grading time.  If essay or short-answer is the norm, consider assigning an ungraded text early in the schedule for the purposes of saving it as an example of each student’s style. If suspicions arise on later tests, you’ll have one more way to check. 

Make sure your questions are valid. They should map to the level of taxonomy set in your course objectives. This will also help avoid making questions too hard or too easy. 

Avoid trick questions. You don’t want to confuse your students. If students are consistently missing a question, then evaluate it and find out why. 

Use scenarios to assess higher-level objectives. This could be done in a Lesson activity or in a Multiple-Choice question within a Quiz.

Related Links

For additional Quiz Strategies, go to DETI’s Quizzes: Best Practices in Online page (UNG login required).